A recent Illinois Attorney General opinion addressed an interesting question: Can a public entity delete comments by community members from its Facebook page? Although the public entity at issue was a municipality, the opinion raises a number of interesting issues for public schools. The Attorney General addressed the question under the Illinois Open Meetings Act (the OMA), and found no violation under that specific law. But, if a court were to address the issue under the First Amendment of the federal Constitution, it is less clear that the public body would prevail. Notably, the First Amendment issue – discussed in part 3 below – is relevant even for school districts outside of Illinois. The decision is a warning to public entities, including school districts, across the country to carefully consider the basis of a decision to delete a user comment from a social networking page.

The Facts

The opinion centered around criticism by a community member about a village’s Facebook page. An articlein the Daily Herald provides the back story. The page came under scrutiny after the village trustee, who maintains the village’s Facebook page, deleted some items and comments from the page. As with most Facebook “fan” pages, users are allowed to comment on the “wall” of the page, but those comments can be deleted unilaterally by the person who maintains the page. The trustee justified the deletions by pointing to an uptick in negative comments and to complaints by other community members that they were reluctant to subscribe to the Facebook page because of negative comments.

The community member that brought the action, a former part-time police officer of the village, was one of the individuals whose comments were deleted. He complained on his blog about his comments being removed. In one post, he said that he would “be exploring remedies for [the village’s] action of censorship on a ‘supposed’ public site.” The Attorney General request for review appears to have been the individual’s first efforts at finding such a remedy.